Antony Hewish, (born May 11, 1924, Fowey, Cornwall, Eng.) British astrophysicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974 for his discovery of pulsars (cosmic objects that emit extremely regular pulses of radio waves).

Antony Hewish amid the four-acre antenna that received the first pulsar signals, Mullard Radio …

Hewish was educated at the University of Cambridge and in 1946 joined the radio astronomy group there led by Sir Martin Ryle. While directing a research project at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory at Cambridge in 1967, Hewish recognized the significance of an observation made by a graduate assistant, Jocelyn Bell. He determined that the regularly patterned radio signals, or pulses, that Bell had detected were not caused by earthly interference or, as some speculated, by intelligent life forms trying to communicate with distant planets but rather were energy emissions from certain stars. For this work in identifying pulsars as a new class of stars, he was awarded jointly with Ryle the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974, the first time the prize had been given for observational astronomy.

Hewish was professor of radio astronomy at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, from 1971 to 1989.

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any of a class of cosmic objects, the first of which were discovered through their extremely regular pulses of radio waves. Some objects are known to give off short rhythmic bursts of visible light, X-rays, and gamma radiation as well, and others are “radio-quiet” and emit only at X-...

study of celestial bodies by examination of the radio-frequency energy they emit or reflect. Radio waves penetrate much of the gas and dust in space, as well as the clouds of planetary atmospheres, and pass through Earth’s atmosphere with little distortion. Radio astronomers can therefore...

...of the pulsar swings the radiation beams around. As the beams sweep regularly past Earth with each complete rotation, an evenly spaced series of pulses is detected by ground-based telescopes. Antony Hewish and Jocelyn Bell, astronomers working at the University of Cambridge, first discovered pulsars in 1967 with the aid of a radio telescope specially designed to record very rapid...